Multipath TCP (MPTCP) is an emerging standard being led by Internet Engineering Task Force's (IETF) Multipath TCP working group that aims at having a single logical TCP connection to use multiple paths to maximize bandwidth and increase redundancy of the connection.
In MPTCP there are multiple sub-flows (network level connections) that are grouped to appear as a single connection to the user. The current techniques for performing rating, charging and policy control, which works at the level of physical connection, is not able to handle the MPTCP connections in any meaningful and consistent manner.
MPTCP is one of the standards that support “multihoming” which is the practice of connecting a host or a computer network to more than one network and creating one logical connection using the underlying multiple physical network connections. Some of the other standards and emerging standards in this area besides MPTCP are SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) and SHIM (Site Multihoming by IPv6 Intermediation). The current techniques for performing rating, charging and policy control, which works at the level of physical connection, are not able to handle the multihoming connections in any meaningful and consistent manner.
There is thus a need for addressing these and/or other issues associated with the prior art.